Richard Ramírez and Performative Satanism: Why Psychopaths Cannot Feel Faith

Who Richard Ramirez Actually Was

Richard Ramirez was born on February 29, 1960, in El Paso, Texas. Between June 1984 and August 1985, he murdered at least 13 people across the Los Angeles area, committed multiple rapes and sexual assaults, and burglarized dozens of homes. He was convicted in September 1989 of 13 counts of murder along with related charges, and sentenced to death. He died of B-cell lymphoma on California’s death row on June 7, 2013, at age 53.

His crimes were notable for their apparent randomness. Unlike many serial killers who fixate on a type, Ramirez attacked men, women, and children. His victims ranged in age from six to 83. He used guns, knives, a machete, a tire iron, and his fists. These murders were performative satanism—not ritual, but theatrical violence designed for an audience. Some victims were sexually assaulted. Some were forced to “swear to Satan” before they were killed. He left satanic symbols at multiple crime scenes.

The media called him the Night Stalker. He liked the name.

The Making of a Psychopath

Ramirez’s childhood was not a mystery. His father, Julian, was physically abusive, a pattern that normalized violence as a method of control in the household. But the more consequential influence was his older cousin, Miguel “Mike” Ramirez (also known as Mike Valles), a decorated Vietnam War veteran who returned to El Paso when Richard was about twelve years old.

Miguel had been part of a platoon of twenty soldiers surrounded by Vietcong forces; he and one other man survived. He came home with four medals, severe PTSD, and something else: a collection of Polaroid photographs showing Vietnamese women he had raped and mutilated. The systematic nature of this childhood trauma mirrors patterns seen in cases like Albert Fish, where institutional failures enabled decades of abuse. He showed these photographs to his twelve-year-old cousin. He bragged about his kills. He taught Richard stealth techniques, how to move through buildings undetected, how to attack from behind.

On May 4, 1973, thirteen-year-old Richard Ramirez was standing in the room when Miguel shot his wife Jesse in the face during a domestic argument. Miguel was found not guilty by reason of insanity, his violence attributed to combat-related PTSD. Richard was left with a clear lesson: violence had no consequences for the person holding the weapon.

This is what criminologists call social learningIn criminology, the process by which individuals acquire criminal behavior through observation and imitation of others, particularly authority figures. Children who witness violence learn to normalize it as a method of control. in its most literal, most destructive form. But his later performative satanism would come from a different source. Ramirez did not develop his capacity for violence in a vacuum. He was taught, explicitly, by someone who had been rewarded for it.

The Satanic Persona: Performative Satanism as Performance Art

Ramirez began identifying with satanism in his late teens. He was drawn to AC/DC, particularly the track “Night Prowler” from the 1979 album Highway to Hell. (For the record, the song is about sneaking into a girlfriend’s bedroom, not murder. the song became a source of lasting controversy for AC/DC after the association with Ramirez became public.) He also read Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible.

But here is where the standard narrative misses something. Ramirez’s satanism was not a belief system. It was a toolkit. He used satanic imagery the way a stage magician uses a top hat: as a prop designed to produce a specific effect on the audience.

Consider the evidence. He forced some victims to “swear to Satan,” but this was not a ritual. It was a dominance exercise. He drew pentagrams at crime scenes, but not consistently, and not in any pattern that suggested devotion. He shouted “Hail Satan” in court, but this was after his arrest, when the cameras were running and the public was watching. He drew the pentagram on his palm for his arraignment. He grinned at the gallery. He displayed “666” alongside the pentagram at a later appearance.

This was not worship. This was performative satanism—pure performance art for an audience of millions.

The Night Stalker and the Satanic Panic

Ramirez committed his murders during the peak of the American Satanic Panic, a moral panicA widespread fear, often exaggerated or unfounded, that a particular group or behavior threatens society's values. Moral panics spread rapidly through media amplification and are frequently based on misinformation rather than evidence. that ran roughly from 1980 to the mid-1990s. It was triggered by the 1980 publication of Michelle Remembers, a now-discredited book by psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith, which alleged satanic ritual abuse recovered through therapy. The panic was sustained by cases like the McMartin preschool trial, in which preschool workers were accused of leading children through underground tunnels for satanic rituals. The McMartin case ran for seven years. It produced zero convictions. A 1994 review found that of more than 12,000 documented accusations of organized satanic abuse nationwide, investigators could not substantiate a single one—a pattern that reflects how contradictory research findings emerge from flawed methodologies.

Into this climate walked Richard Ramirez, a serial killer who seemed to confirm everything the panic predicted. He was, to the media and the public, a real satanist committing real satanic crimes. Except the crimes had nothing to do with satanism. They were the product of psychopathyA personality disorder characterized by lack of empathy, guilt, and remorse, combined with manipulative behavior and shallow emotion. Psychopathic individuals score 30+ on clinical assessment tools like the PCL-R., learned violence, and opportunity. The satanic trappings were decoration.

What Ramirez demonstrated is that performative satanism requires no genuine faith. He did not need Satan to kill. He had been killing and assaulting before the satanic imagery became consistent. What the imagery gave him was attention, fear, and a sense of theatrical grandeur that fed his narcissism. The Satanic Panic provided the perfect backdrop. The audience was already primed to be terrified—a classic example of anti-motivated reasoningReasoning away from a conclusion you find unwelcome by actively searching for flaws in the evidence, rather than evaluating it impartially. The direction is chosen before the analysis begins., where people reject evidence that contradicts what they want to believe—and Ramirez gave them exactly what they expected.

The Trial and the Performance

At trial, Ramirez displayed what clinicians describe as grandiose narcissism. He followed his own press coverage obsessively and reportedly enjoyed being called the Night Stalker. He received fan mail and marriage proposals while awaiting trial. He married one of his admirers, Doreen Lioy, in 1996 on San Quentin’s death row.

When the jury returned with a death sentence, Ramirez said: “Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland.”

This is not the response of a man who believes in an afterlife, satanic or otherwise. It is the response of someone performing indifference because the alternative (showing vulnerability) is psychologically impossible. It is the response of someone whose relationship to Satan was always performative—always about what Satan could do for Richard Ramirez in the here and now: generate fear, claim power, externalize responsibility.

The PsychopathyA personality disorder characterized by lack of empathy, guilt, and remorse, combined with manipulative behavior and shallow emotion. Psychopathic individuals score 30+ on clinical assessment tools like the PCL-R. Checklist and What It Reveals

The standard clinical tool for assessing psychopathy is the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), developed by Canadian psychologist Robert Hare. It scores individuals on a scale of 0 to 40 across 20 items measuring interpersonal, affective, lifestyle, and antisocial traits. A score of 30 or above is considered the threshold for psychopathy. The average score in the general population falls between 4 and 22.

Richard Ramirez scored in the range of 31 to 35 on the PCL-R, depending on the assessment. For reference, Ted Bundy is estimated to have scored 39. Both are well above the clinical threshold. Ramirez scored particularly high on traits related to lack of remorse, lack of empathy, impulsiveness, shallow affect, and inability to accept responsibility for his actions.

Psychiatrist Michael Stone has described Ramirez as a “made” psychopath rather than a “born” one, meaning his psychopathy was substantially shaped by environment and experience rather than being purely innate. Stone also noted signs of schizoid personality disorderA pervasive pattern of detachment from social relationships, limited emotional expression, and preference for solitary activities, affecting roughly 3-5% of the general population., which contributed to Ramirez’s profound indifference to the suffering he caused. The combination of psychopathic traits, schizoid detachment, and early violent conditioning produced someone with virtually no capacity for emotional connection to other human beings.

This matters for understanding his relationship to satanism, because genuine religious faith requires precisely the emotional architecture that psychopathy destroys.

Why Psychopaths Cannot Genuinely Believe

Religious belief, from a neuroscience and psychology perspective, is not purely an intellectual exercise. It involves what researchers call “mentalizing” or theory of mindThe cognitive ability to understand that other people have beliefs, desires, intentions, and knowledge that differ from your own — the mental capacity that underlies empathy, social prediction, and reading a room.: the ability to attribute beliefs, intentions, and emotions to other agents, including supernatural ones. A 2016 study published in PLOS ONE found that religious belief correlates with empathetic engagement: people who believe in God tend to suppress analytical brain networks in favor of social-emotional processing. Faith, in neurological terms, is partially an act of empathy directed at an unseen entity.

Psychopaths, by definition, have profoundly impaired empathetic processing. The affective deficits at the core of psychopathy (shallow emotions, inability to form genuine attachments, reduced capacity for guilt and remorse) are the same deficits that would be required for authentic religious experience.

A 2021 study by Schofield and colleagues, published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, examined 199 adults and found that religious belief predicted reduced psychopathy. Individuals with stronger religious convictions showed lower psychopathic traits. Research on incarcerated populations has found similar patterns: those scoring highest on affective dysfunction (the empathy-and-guilt deficit cluster) reported the lowest levels of religiosity and spirituality.

This does not mean all atheists are psychopaths, or that all believers are empathetic. The relationship is correlational and modest. But the pattern is consistent enough to support a specific mechanism: the emotional substrate required for genuine faith (the capacity to feel connected to something beyond the self, to experience awe, guilt, or transcendence) overlaps substantially with the emotional substrate that psychopathy impairs.

Put simply: if you cannot feel empathy for the person sitting next to you, you are unlikely to feel a genuine spiritual connection to an entity you have never seen. You can say the words. You cannot mean them.

Instrumental Religion: The Psychopath’s Relationship to Faith

This does not mean psychopaths avoid religion. Quite the opposite. Research consistently finds that psychopaths are drawn to religious contexts as tools for manipulation. Robert Hare’s work on psychopathy in institutional settings documents how psychopaths exploit religious communities because those communities offer trust, forgiveness, and a built-in audience disposed to take professions of faith at face value.

Like John Wayne Gacy, who used respectability as camouflage, Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, served as president of his Lutheran church council while murdering ten people over three decades. David Berkowitz, Son of Sam, claimed to be commanded by a demon and later became a born-again Christian in prison, amending his confession to include membership in a satanic cult. In each case, the religious identity served the psychopath’s needs: cover, manipulation, narrative control, or attention.

Ramirez’s satanism follows the same pattern. His “faith” provided several instrumental benefits. It offered an externalized justification for violence (“Satan made me do it” is a narrative that shifts agency). It produced terror in victims, some of whom were devout Christians being told to swear to the devil. It generated media attention and public notoriety, feeding narcissistic supply. And it created a mythology around Ramirez that attracted admirers, including the woman he eventually married.

None of these functions require belief. All of them require an audience.

The Difference Between Ramirez and Actual Satanists

It is worth noting that the Church of Satan, founded by Anton LaVey in 1966, and the Satanic Temple, founded in 2013, are real organizations with codified philosophies. LaVeyan Satanism is essentially atheistic individualism dressed in religious iconography. The Satanic Temple is a political advocacy organization that uses satanic imagery to challenge religious overreach in government. Neither organization endorses violence. Neither would have recognized Ramirez as one of their own.

Ramirez read LaVey’s The Satanic Bible, but there is no evidence he engaged with its philosophy in any meaningful way. LaVeyan Satanism emphasizes self-discipline, strategic thinking, and the avoidance of stupidity (literally: “Stupidity” is the first of its Nine Satanic Sins). Ramirez was impulsive, careless, and ultimately caught because he left a fingerprint on a stolen car. He did not embody the philosophy he claimed to follow. He borrowed its aesthetics because the aesthetics were useful.

This distinction mattered enormously during the Satanic Panic and still matters now. When a psychopath adopts religious imagery, the public tends to blame the religion. The McMartin preschool case, the West Memphis Three, and dozens of other cases show what happens when society mistakes performance for belief: innocent people go to prison, actual practitioners of minority religions face persecution, and the real mechanisms of violence (psychopathy, trauma, social learningIn criminology, the process by which individuals acquire criminal behavior through observation and imitation of others, particularly authority figures. Children who witness violence learn to normalize it as a method of control., opportunity) go unexamined.

What the Satanic Panic Got Wrong

The Satanic Panic of the 1980s was one of the largest moral panicsA widespread fear, often exaggerated or unfounded, that a particular group or behavior threatens society's values. Moral panics spread rapidly through media amplification and are frequently based on misinformation rather than evidence. in American history. Over 12,000 allegations of organized satanic ritual abuse were documented. Not one was substantiated by investigators. The panic was driven by discredited therapeutic techniques (recovered-memory therapy), media amplification, and a public primed by Cold War anxieties and the rise of the religious right to see supernatural evil behind ordinary crime.

Ramirez fed this panic, but he did not cause it. The panic was already in full swing before his arrest. What he did, consciously or not, was exploit the existing fear to magnify his own image. In a country terrified of satanic conspiracies, a serial killer who claimed to serve Satan was the worst nightmare made flesh. The fact that his “satanism” was as genuine as a Halloween costume was irrelevant to the cultural effect.

The same dynamic, incidentally, plays out in other contexts. When Andrei Chikatilo murdered 52 people in the Soviet Union, the system’s refusal to believe serial killers existed under socialism allowed him to kill for twelve years. In both cases, society’s preferred narrative about the nature of evil (supernatural conspiracy in America, impossible-under-communism in the USSR) actively obstructed the investigation of actual violence by actual people.